If you spend more time reading camera and lens reviews than actually taking pictures, there is something majorly wrong. [Link]

Or you just can’t afford the camera you want.

Brian over at Elite by Design has amassed a truly terrific collection of forty black and white photos for your viewing pleasure. Black and white images always seem to have a bit more to them, they seem a lot deeper and leave a lot to the imagination.

I just need to get something off my chest. Ever since August, and the purchase of my MacBook Air the number one comment that I’ve had has been:

“Is that the one without a CD drive? Why did you get that? You can’t even watch DVDs”.

Yes, how observant of you. Have a cookie. If I wanted to watch DVDs on my computer I would have made a sensible move and purchased a computer that has an optical drive. I didn’t buy the computer unaware that it didn’t include one. Please don’t insult my intelligence by assuming such things. There’s a lot more to using a computer than watching movies.

iTunes. iTunes. iTunes. I buy my music from iTunes, I buy television shows from iTunes, I rent and buy movies; from iTunes. Problem solved. Move on.

That is all.

I never understood why Microsoft were selling software to protect their own operating system. It’s good to see they’re taking the software in the right direction - lightweight, nonintrusive and best of all free.

What is a Moleskine?

Moleskine is the heir of the legendary notebook, used by European artists and thinkers for the past two centuries.

This silent and discreet keeper of an extraordinary tradition, which has been missing for years, has been reproduced by the Italian company Modo & Modo since 1998. With it’s various different page styles in accompanies the creative professional and has become a symbol of contemporary nomadism.

Rather vague, ‘eh? But still quite effective at putting forward the heritage of a Moleskine notebook. A Moleskine is like Microsoft is to computers, but just to notebooks. They produce some of the highest quality products you will ever come across.

I have been using a Moleskine for just under a year now as my sole notebook. I think I first heard about it via a tweet and decided to check them out. So, I placed my order for a large Volant notebook with ruled lines. At first I was concerned about the price, unable to comprehend how a notebook of all things could have such an elevated price tag.

When I first opened it up I realised why people have become so dependent and excited about what I thought might only be a notebook. You get a very strong sense of the build quality, from the smaller details to just the care taken into the production of a Moleskine notebook. The paper is not thin and flimsy; but solid, closer to card. There are details in a Moleskine that you just don’t get most of the time from products of a similar price: for instance there is a pocket in the back of the book used for storing extras like lose paper. The edges of the notebook are curved, suggesting that the paper was not a load of A5 sheets collected together.

Plenty of people like to lay out the pages of their notebook in a certain fashion, having different areas of the paper for various tasks. I on the other hand like my Moleskine to be a simple stream of my consciousness (sounds very groovy doesn’t it?) onto paper. I started writing solely with pencil, always, always sharp, but after a little while realised that pen was superior – after all, you can see all the mistakes you’ve made when looking back. I’m now a big fan of Lamy fountain pens with blue ink, never black.

I am aware that a few people out there just don’t understand the concept of writing things down on paper. I think the issue is organisation:

On a computer you’re pretty much forced to save something in a location and if it doesn’t have one, create one. With a Moleskine, I can just write it down. You don’t need to think about a file name or location. You could spend that time thinking about actually what you want to write. After all, who likes making a Text Edit document just to write down a sentence or two? It doesn’t make sense to waste all that time.

Overall, I think the reason that I enjoy paper over computers for taking down notes and ideas is because with a notebook, you start at the beginning and finish at the end. You have this archive of your thoughts (I suppose in a similar way to a blog) and how they have changed. At the end of the day you can have a high quality book, that sits your shelf,hopefully outliving your computer, that you can look through with ease for years to come.

Any other Moleskine users out there? I’d be interested in hearing why you chose one.

I found a terrific article from way back in 2003 on starting a business, there’s some great advice in it – but the best is for young people (like myself) wanting to start a business:

Technical knowledge and raw talent only go so far. When working at a company, you see how established businesses function: how workflow is managed, how clients are dealt with, how managers treat workers, and the absolutely critical nature of deadlines, no matter how tight. These are invaluable lessons that school does not teach.

You have to follow before you can lead.

There has been a lot of hype over the last week about EventBox, a new piece of software for the Mac which is designed to aggregate all of the social networks you use and also act as an RSS Reader – all within one application. So not wanting to be left out, I downloaded a copy of the free 15 (why not 30?) day trial for a spin, The verdict so far? I can’t say I’m that impressed.

First of all, I don’t really like writing about software that doesn’t work for me, after all I’m just one guy with one opinion. However, as EventBox is currently in beta I thought it would be best to give them some constructive feedback from some of my experiences with the application. So why not start with the good points – primarily the actual concept behind the application. I’m surprised that it took so long for an app like this to be created, it has all the right elements to make it a fantastic program.

I think that a lot of people have been looking for something to bring together all of the sites they visit of a regular basis. For me the key applications that this would replace are NetNewsWire and Twitterific. So as far as I’m concerned – they are the main competition for EventBox. Don’t be surprised if you hear me comparing them a lot – I think it’s quite fair to.

I’m not going to complain about the amount of social networks, because I’m sure more are coming but I want to talk about why this app hasn’t been earth shattering for me.

Information Overload

Every time I open EventBox up, things start flashing at me and numbers increase rapidly, I just can’t take seeing the number 500 in my dock. So most of the time I’d close EventBox and open up both NetNewsWire and Twitterific because lets face it, information is a lot simpler to digest in chunks. It’s a lot easier to move from doing one task to another; for me it’s Tweets first followed by RSS.

One idea I had was to have a ‘breakfast mode’ in which you can customise what section of EventBox gets your attention first. Let’s put this in context:

I open up EventBox at 6AM (and the apps notices this) and find the Twitter section of the app is all that is available to me. All the other sections are grayed out and there are no numbers alluding to how many feeds there are in the dock or sidebar. Once I’ve caught up on all my Tweets I can press this big button in the bottom of the window saying “Finished!”. From there I automatically get sent on to my RSS feeds, or Pownce, Flickr…. whatever you want.

It may seem unnecessary and infantile to a lot of people, but for people like myself who are easily distracted – this could be a godsend.

Layout

When I see my Flickr images within EventBox I can’t help think what a waste of space it is. A long bar with the image on the left and just space to the right of it across the window is a bad idea. Why not have a grid view, like iTunes, that when clicked on flips around, in a similar fashion to Dashboard Widgets, showing the information and meta-data for the picture?

I believe that there are a few changes that could be made to the layout in the RSS section of EventBox. I only have a 13.3″ of screen real estate. At the moment I’m only able to see about three feed items at once. I’m a big fan of how NNW gives you a list view of just the title and other details in one line – before you click on the post, I think that’s all you need. If the title grabs me I’ll read it. And yes, I have adjusted the preview sizes.

Twitter & Pownce

Both the Twitter and Pownce modules for EventBox were done very well, I enjoyed little touches such as it filling in people’s usernames in the post box if you click on a tweet. Though it may be a good idea to increase the differences in colours for @ and direct messages.

One way that I think EventBox could really set itself apart from other Twitter clients such as Twitterific, is by having filters for certain subjects. I suppose this could be done in a similar way to how Apple’s Mail works with rules. A good example for this would be all those times when you get someone tweeting: “New Blog Post…”. It would be great to have those not appear in the main feed – just a separate folder.

At The End Of The Day

Eventbox is one of those pieces of software that with a bit of time and a strong community behind it could really flourish. And I hope it does. But I just can’t say it works for me… yet. I hope that if anybody from EventBox is reading this; they post a rebuttal. I’d be interested in hearing more from them.

PS: Does anybody know why I keep accidently referring to this software as OpenBox?

The ‘Joys’ Of Installing CS4 –

Nice. So now we have a bunch of things, one of which is called “Setup.app” and is presumably the Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium installer application. Never mind that everyone else on the planet uses the verb to install rather than to set up. Never mind that the file’s name contains no indication of what it is that it is going to be “setting up.” Never mind that there are all kinds of other things in this folder that the user does not need to see. Never mind that the application in question has the exact same icon as the thing that you’ve just clicked on, which was a folder.

I own CS3 and can’t say I found installing it a pain – but the updates are. I made the mistake of uninstalling a few of the apps from the suite and now those I do use won’t update.

I hope Adobe can get their act together, they seem pretty in tune with the internet community so maybe we’ll here something back from them. Until then, I’m steering clear of CS4 – not that I’d use most of the new features anyways.

Even if you don’t use any of Adobe’s products, this makes a highly entertaining read, even if it wasn’t meant to be.

For my UK readers out there, Top Gear, one of the best programs on TV (along with Dragons Den) is now on iTunes.

Each episode of the new series will be purchasable eight days after it’s aired – an episode is up on iPlayer for seven days y’see – and the whole of series 10 is also available from right now.

Enjoy! I will.

I’ve always had a problem with managing my mailbox, I just didn’t have the determination or patience to be organized and I couldn’t even understand how it was meant to help me in the first place, I’d read a lot on Inbox Zero, from Merlin’s writings on 43 Folders, and finally realised what the problem was and how it would soon start effecting me, here’s the page turning quote:

Here’s the deal: your email has been accumulating because you don’t have the time to answer it properly, which is certainly reasonable and accurate. You also fear losing track of the email you haven’t responded to — that it will fall between the cracks. This fear is also reasonable and accurate. But you’re just as keenly aware that with the backlog of email you have plus the increasing rate of incoming messages you receive each day, you can’t possibly ever catch up. This, sadly, is also entirely reasonable and accurate. It’s all reasonable and it’s all accurate, but come on: something’s gotta give.

Though I must admit, it was not a blog post or article that inspired me straight away to clean up my inbox – but the fact that I couldn’t (and still can’t) find my invoice for the software application, Pukka. In the end I decided that I wasn’t going to let that happen again, so adopted a method: instead of having one master inbox, have several smaller ones that filter out the noise. In the end I settled on using some aspects of Inbox Zero, more specifically having an Action, Reply and Hold mailbox. These three folders are all manually added to. I decided to not set any rules (more on that later) for these folders for a couple of reasons: first, so I have a more active role in deciding what is important in my workflow and secondly because I don’t trust Mail to get it totally right. A computer isn’t quite good enough at setting my priorities

I’m not going to go into some of the intraccies of Inbox Zero, Merlin’s covered that pretty well, but I do want to talk briefly about rules within Apple Mail.

All of my other inboxes have one, if not more rules associated with them. A rule is a set of parameters you assign to an inbox. Below is a screenshot of my Bacn mailbox rule, which I stole of Michael Mistretta after it was mentioned in his interview with Chris Bowler:

As you can see I have the email addresses that Flickr, Facebook and Twitter use to send me updates. The ‘From’ refers to what it will look in – in this case the email address. ‘is equal to’ means that it has to be exactly that. And the final box is for whatever you are referencing the rule to. Rules however, aren’t limited to the email address it’s from. You can choose keywords, dates and subjects. Now that a lot of the noise is filtered out; it is far easier to get to the more pressing correspondences.

I of course, also have an ‘Archives’ folder for those emails that aren’t relevant to my day to day work – but may come in useful in the future. For instance, I have a copy of the email containing the final version of this blog’s theme and the instructions on how to set it up.

From there it really depends what I’m working on at the time, so right now I have a Desktop Vibes folder that all comments left on posts go to – or any emails I get from it’s editor Chris. This is all accomplished with rules that have been set up earlier. I’m not going to lie, it took me a while to get exactly what I wanted from them and at one point I got totally lost, and worried that I’d accidently deleted four months worth of important emails.

But what has been the outcome of all this comprehensive email management? I at least feel a lot more satisfied and less overwhelmed when I open up Mail every morning. And of course, I’ve achieved the objective that I set out to reach when I started – I know where things are kept! What’s next? I’m pretty satisfied with the way things are working right now so I don’t see any immediate changes that that I’d make straight away.

If you’re looking for a good guide for setting up rules in Mail. There aren’t any (at least that I could find!). So in an effort to solve this, I’m in the process of writing up an article for Desktop Vibes on this very subject. I’d be interested in hearing how you regulate your email. Do you think you have to get a certain amount of email before it becomes necessary or is it a good habit to get into?